FEMA Cuts Disaster Spending, Leaving States Fending for Themselves

Life is inching back to normal in the town of Cave City seven months after a tornado slammed into its corner of northeastern Arkansas. The only grocery store is about to reopen. Crews are starting to dig the foundation for a rebuilt funeral home.

But the town — like so many others facing daunting recoveries from recent disaster — has had to go it alone, Mayor Jonas Anderson said.

The Trump administration denied Cave City’s requests for Federal Emergency Management Agency money to help it recover. Mr. Anderson was forced to forge ahead anyway, racking up a bill of about $300,000 he said could end up eating 15 percent of the small town’s annual budget.

Some of the nearly 2,000 residents have gotten federal help. FEMA agreed to cover repairs to the more than 50 homes damaged or destroyed when 165 mile per hour winds struck in March. The state pledged relief money, too. But Mr. Anderson said Cave City is carrying more of the burden of recovery than expected.

This could be the future for more communities across the country, based on Mr. Trump’s vision for emergency management in the United States: one that would transfer responsibility for disaster recovery from the federal government to the states in all but the largest catastrophes. For many places, it is already the reality.

FEMA has been delaying disaster declarations and aid payments to communities, adding new hurdles to access some grant funds and cutting off the flow of money intended to boost resilience and prevent future disasters from causing so much damage.

Emergency managers and elected officials across the country are adjusting to a system in which they can no longer count on the sort of disaster aid they typically expect from FEMA, which was established in 1979 to coordinate and professionalize disaster response. They are figuring out how to prepare for future disasters without key FEMA grants, raising private funds to replace federal aid and turning to state governments to beef up their preparations. In some places, volunteer disaster recovery squads have sprung up.

In an emailed statement, the FEMA spokesman Daniel Llargues said that the agency has held back some disaster relief funding, saving it for the future. For example, a monthly report on the agency’s spending this summer showed it withheld $11 billion for projects tied to a coronavirus pandemic disaster declaration that states had expected to receive by Sept. 30. Agency officials said those payments are not canceled, but rather deferred into the new fiscal year to ensure the solvency of the government fund used to pay for disaster aid.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, FEMA remains committed to supporting disaster survivors,” Mr. Llargues wrote. He said the agency is managing disaster funding “in a way that prioritizes immediate needs and long-term recovery efforts.”

Still, the consequence of such delays could be that communities find themselves less prepared when disaster does strike, critics said.

“They’re making good on their promise to shift the burden onto states without giving the states any runway to prepare for that,” said Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who tracks disaster recovery spending across the country.

Slower-than-expected hurricane and wildfire seasons have meant few recent tests of the evolving emergency response system, allowing FEMA to stretch its disaster relief fund further than it might otherwise. The fund had been forecast to run out of money by now but as of the end of September, it was projected to contain more than $2 billion, down from a routine $22.5 billion infusion from Congress in March.

Since January, Mr. Trump has approved 32 federal disaster declarations, which make available a variety of federal aid programs to communities and individuals. That’s far fewer than the average of more than 60 declarations per year from fiscal years 2015 through 2024, according to the Congressional Research Service. Mr. Trump has rejected nearly a dozen state requests for FEMA aid so far this year, on par with the numbers of rejections during his first administration as well as President Joe Biden’s term, according to FEMA data.

A steady backlog of pending disaster aid requests has persisted this year, sitting at a dozen as of Tuesday. Under previous administrations, there have rarely been more than a handful of outstanding requests at any given time.

Normally, Congress would appropriate tens of billions of dollars to refill the disaster aid fund at this time of year. Amid a government shutdown stretching into its third week, there has been little discussion of disaster funding on Capitol Hill. A bipartisan group of members is supporting a House bill that would make FEMA a Cabinet-level agency, removing it from the Homeland Security Department while streamlining its payment process and speeding up agency investments in disaster resilience around the country.

“These disasters tend to be multistate,” Mr. Pallone said. “If you have to do everything yourself, it’s not going to work because you don't have the expertise.”

Proponents of a trimmed-down FEMA, on the other hand, argue that too much federal aid can prevent communities from investing in their own preparedness. State and local governments are more closely attuned to communities’ needs, and should be equipped to handle the most common and predictable types of disasters, said Dominik Lett, a budget policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a right-leaning research organization.

But in places still recovering from historic disasters, slow and unpredictable support from FEMA demonstrates the limits of those ideas. In western North Carolina a year after Hurricane Helene — and four years after an earlier bout of devastating flooding from the remnants of Tropical Storm Fred — the town of Canton is still operating out of trailers and waiting for federal money it expected for a new town hall and police station, Mayor Zeb Smathers said.

“We should not have to count on recovery like it’s raffle money,” Mr. Smathers said. “It should be streamlined, efficient, dependable. It’s not.”

“We have people who still have tarps on their roofs who haven’t been able to rebuild,” she said. “A lot of communities aren’t even relying on the federal government anymore.”

At the same time, the Trump administration has either paused or canceled grant programs designed to help communities improve their resilience to disasters.

Erik Thorsen, chief executive of Columbia Memorial Hospital on the Oregon coast, said that as construction continues on a $300 million expansion that could withstand a powerful earthquake and tsunami, he is scrambling to replace a $14 million FEMA grant that is no longer coming.

A lawsuit filed by 20 states is seeking to reinstate the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program, saying that since it was established in 2018 during Mr. Trump’s first term, its roughly $4.5 billion in investments have prevented $150 billion in disaster damage.

In Cave City, where plans for a new park and community center are on hold because the town has to devote its tax revenue to tornado recovery, Mr. Anderson said he understands why President Trump would want states to handle more disasters. They know their residents’ needs best, after all.

But when that shift happens seemingly overnight, it creates uncertainty that makes it harder for local officials to make decisions, and can leave livelihoods hanging in the balance, Mr. Anderson said.

“It’s definitely going to have to be an adjustment,” he said. “Nobody has the resources that the federal government can have.”